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Hi Carl,

Those are all low value links,  the first two are full of links that are using optimised link text for anchors so an obvious target for devaluation and/or penalties. The third link doesn't look like a directory as such, but still very low value with so many links on one page. If you are talking about disavowing the links, I would say this depends on your overall link profile. One or two of these kinds of links probably isnt going to hurt you, I certainly would not be looking to acquire them now though.

Hi Nikita,

I am going with Tom on this one. Google has made a obvious effort to cut down on web spam in all forms over the last year or two. This effort has included the devaluing of various types of links and various ranking penalties for sites it thinks are 'breaking the rules'.

Now you say these links seem legit, but the process of obtaining them is anything but. A fiver to get 15 links on edu sites that are in every way only there for the link? This is spam.

Regardless of if these links are going to have any benefit (agree with Tom here, I seriously doubt it but in some verticals you never know) the bigger picture is you are leaving the door open to future penalties and/or drops in rankings due to a dodgy link profile. I would never want to have to get into that conversation with a client!

Hi Andy,

Not sure why you are seeing a 403 error (I don't see this in the headers), but you seem to have an issue with your rel=canonical tag on your homepage. It is showing a relative link to "/home" which leads you to this page: http://www.inoncology.com/home/ which is actually showing a 200 OK status, but is obviously not!

Digging into the headers a bit more it seems you might have a circular redirect going on before that, I am seeing /home redirect to /content/internet/pm/inoncology/com_EN which seems to redirect back to /home/.

No 403 in all of those, but maybe the combination of wrong rel canonical tag plus the mixed up redirects is causing the moz crawler and screaming frog to choke?

Hi,

The new(ish) business.facebook.com is pretty much the MCC equivalent. It can be a bit difficult to figure out in the beginning but it is a lot better than the situation you describe! Check out the official faq page here.

Hi Bridget,

There is no alt attribute in css, so no you cannot add it there,

There are a couple of things you can do.

1. Optimizing your image file names will at least give an indication of what the image is about and

2. Rethink your css and the use of background images. Specifically you could get the same effect as you have now without background images using a combination of absolutely and relatively positioned divs. This way you can have the same layout as now but with the image in the html rather than the css and alt tags will be available for them.

Check the link here for some demo code: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8708945/how-to-position-text-over-an-image-in-css

Hope that helps!

Regardless of the value (or lack of) of a specific link from a specific directory I would agree with you that the seomoz directory list is a bit problematic. Since they are listed it does give the impression (rightly or wrongly) that these directories are 'approved' by seomoz and this might be sending the wrong message to many people. Would be interested in hearing the thoughts of a staff member on this, personally I would be tempted to get rid of the list!

Hi Egol,

Yes I have done it - so if part of your question was a technical 'is this possible?' then it is. You can check which pages your ads are showing on by going into display network -> placements and then clicking the 'see details' button. This will give you a list of specific page placements which ran your ad.

As to if it is worth it or not, that depends on a lot of factors including what objective you have in mind, your budget etc.
I will say that running keyword + placements together often results in a very narrow set of pages that your ad becomes eligible for. This can be ok depending on the objective of the campaign but I often find that it is better to either run broader keyword only campaigns which I then add negative placements to (if I see placement sites I don't like much) or else run a very specific managed placement campaign with certain exclusions based on the categories of the site(s) if needed.

Bid levels vary a lot depending on the site and how many other advertisers want to appear there. Well known sites like the NYTimes are usually going to be more expensive than a niche site but it all depends on your targeting, what you are willing to bid and what any other advertisers are willing to bid. if a specific site is turning out to be too expensive to bid on then you could try making it a remarketing only campaign which restricts your ads to people that have already visited your site and you might then feel more comfortable bidding a higher amount for them to see your ad. If you have historical conversion data on the campaign it might also be worth trying a CPA bidding model to see if that works better for you.

n my experience display campaigns are great for remarketing and branding/awareness type campaigns but can really suck up budget if not controlled properly and kept on a tight leash.

Hi Raghuram,

You have a relative link hiding in your author bio, the one to twitter is like this:

[happyschools/](<a class=)" title="Twitter" target="_blank">Twitter

That will be the guilty one!

Hi David,

A couple of things to try (I haven't tested them)

Set up an xml update on the cms page like this:

<reference name="head"><action method="setTitle"><title>Your Module Page Title</title></action></reference>

Depending on the controllers this might change both page and breadcrumb titles (not sure if that is what you are after)

If you don't mind doing a small code change the trick described here: http://inchoo.net/ecommerce/magento/change-any-page-title-in-magento/ should do it. If following that you would actually be doing it backwards, the normal page title would be used in the breadcrumb and the updated page title used in the title tag.

If actually the breadcrumb is not the most important thing for that page you could just remove it, also with an xml update like this: <remove name="</code">"breadcrumbs"``/></remove>

Hope one of those helps!

Hi,

Well you have started on the right track with moz and the other tools! Personally I would take a step back from the link building and get a good grounding in the basics first. The moz beginner guide is a great place to start.

In regards your link profile, the moz metrics can be a bit deceptive if you have done a lot of link building in comparison to your competitors, the authority numbers can be somewhat inflated even though the links are not high value (and indeed are even hurting you). Your link profile to me looks problematic, especially the non www which has quite a few linking texts which seem completely unrelated to your site (check the anchors cloud in the ahrefs links above). Is this the reason for your ranking problems? Maybe and there is a good chance you will need to try to get rid of some of those links if possible. Might be worth asking whoever built these links if it is possible to unwind some of them, but this is a whole different conversation and worth a separate qa question where someone with more experience in getting rid of bad links might jump in with more specific advice.

What I can certainly say now is I would stop the link building you are currently doing as it looks problematic and there is no point in making it even worse. Then go through the moz guide, get a good grounding in the basics and in the first instance concentrate on building links from relevant sources from your offline world. What I mean is incorporate your real world contacts and actions with your site, register your business/site with relevant local business directories or local photography groups for example. Be a normal business with normal business activities in other words and incorporate these when relevant to a link here or there. There is no 'acceptable' rate of link building, but honestly for a local wedding photography site a 'natural' rate could be only a link or two a week! 40 a day is simply asking for a penalty, why would a site like this be getting so many links if not to try and game the search engines?

Hope that helps!

Hi,

This happens quite often if redirects are not implemented with adwords in mind. You can either ask your developers to tweak the redirect code so that url parameters are passed on during the redirect or alternatively change the relevant adwords urls to go directly to the redirected url which will bypass the redirect completely and should preserve the gclid parameters. Depends a bit on how temporary or permanent the redirect is (you say you are using a 302 temporary redirect currently but this would normally be a 301 if the change is permanent).

Hi Christopher,

I suppose it depends on the 3rd party site but I am not aware of any of the well known ones allowing this kind of thing. Just thinking out loud but if you are getting loads of onsite reviews, that obviously indicates a willingness of the customers to leave a comment, so you could try to push some of those reviews to the the 3rd party sites just by linking to the relevant page and inviting customers to leave a review there instead (or also). I have had some success linking to the review sites with a 'we would love for you to leave a comment/review' type text at the end of final conversion pages and/or in order confirmation emails also.

Hope that helps!

Hi Christiaan,

In your post 'top 5 video marketing trends for 2013' you have a link to your homepage without the http:// at the front. That is probably responsible for all your those 404s. Hope that helps!

HI Tom

If they are two very different websites then why would it matter if they are on the same c block or not?

Personally I would not get too worried about trying to hide the connection from google, it is a losing game in most cases. That being said, most of the content you mention seems to be relevant to the ecom site, I would be tempted to host it on the same domain. Use the blog site to add relevant reviews and content and to help boost the overall domain authority of the main site. Just because the blog is hosted on the ecom site doesn't mean the reviews cannot be unbiased!

My two cents!

Hi George,

Doesn't look like an article submission site to me, looks like a domain that expired a few years ago but had a decent backlink profile and has now been picked up by someone to sell links or pad out their own link profile(s). The newspaper articles look like they are from feeds and the only links I can see that are not to big US newspapers are the three little links down in the footer. The site itself only appears to have about 10 pages in total.

Hi Matt,

The user agent is called rogerbot, you can see a reference to it here (towards the bottom of the page).

Hi Phillip,

Check out this great reference by Dr Pete: http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions

In a nutshell (if I can get my head around it)  rel canonical is 'suggesting' to google which version of a page should be indexed for search purposes while 301 redirects are basically taking you to the canonical version of the page already and therefore is more final in regards both users and bots.

The set up you have (assuming that you want to consolidate 1234.com to realsite.com permanently) has a problem in that you are telling google that realsite.com/en-us has a canonical of 1234.com (which is just a suggestion, not a permanent redirect) and therefore yes the canonical as you say is not being reognised in the way you expect it to be because it is indeed just a suggestion, not a followed link if you see what I mean. I think 301 redirecting the realsite/en-us to realsite.com is the only thing that will be a permanent solution.

Hope I got that right, maybe someone else can chime in....

Hi Dana,

Thomas makes good points in regards nginx and lightspeed, but since making changes to server setup can sometimes be a big pain it is worth verifying if the page loads times have really been affected as you think.

The pagespeed insights numbers can be a bit deceiving in that they are telling you how many 'best practice' checkboxes you have ticked while not actually telling you how fast your pages are loading. You could have a pagespeed value of only 50 for example, but pages loading in 1.5 seconds (fast in other words). First thing to do if you havent already is to check the page speed times in analytics (content -> site speed) and see what numbers they are giving you and if they have gone up at all since you installed the apache modules. I cannot think of any technical reason for those modules to negatively affect page speed times, but it is worth checking. Also worth checking page load times through a tool that mimics higher server loads. I have used http://loadimpact.com/ which seems pretty good.

Once you have determined your real page load times you can then assess if there is a problem and the best way to approach it (which can depend a lot on what the root cause of the slow times is).

You say you have submitted lots over the last couple of days, keep in mind that every time you upload a file it replaces all the previous ones. So you need to be adding to your one main disavow file, not uploading multiple different files. That being said, if possible I would do the grunt work beforehand and try not to upload a lot of files over a short period of time.

Hi,

If you go into your crawl report and drill down to the 404 report you will see a column showing what page is linking to the missing page. Based on this you can remove the bad link and fix your 404 problem. Be sure to also verify the missing page is not still listed in any sitemaps you have. Hope it helps!